Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born on 25 July 1920 in Notting Hill, London, into an affluent British Jewish family. Her father Ellis Arthur Franklin was a merchant banker who taught at the Working Men's College; her mother was Muriel Frances Waley. Rosalind was the eldest daughter and the second of five children. She stood out at school from an early age.

From 1938 to 1941 she studied natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge. From 1942 she researched the porous structure of coal for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, which led to her Cambridge doctorate in 1945. In 1947 she went to Paris, where she mastered X-ray crystallography under Jacques Mering.

In January 1951 she joined John Randall's group at King's College London. She was assigned to DNA fibres, with PhD student Raymond Gosling as her assistant. With a microcamera she refined herself and adjustable humidity, she found that DNA exists in two forms, which she called 'A' and 'B'. In November 1951 she presented her findings in a lecture.

In 1952 Gosling, under her supervision, took the X-ray photograph of the B form known as 'Photo 51', the fifty-first image in his series. Franklin analysed the patterns quantitatively and was reluctant to build models until the data sufficed. In early 1953 she concluded that both forms contained two helices; in March she moved to Birkbeck College.

At Birkbeck she led her own group, under J. D. Bernal, studying the structure of viruses. With colleagues including Aaron Klug, Kenneth Holmes, John Finch and Donald Caspar she showed that the tobacco mosaic virus is a hollow tube of protein with the RNA wound along its inner wall. Late in life she began work on the poliovirus.

After the Second World War, molecular biology grew out of physics and chemistry. X-ray diffraction made it possible to infer the structure of biological molecules. A race to find the structure of DNA was under way, with teams in London (Wilkins and Franklin) and Cambridge (Watson and Crick), while Linus Pauling in the United States also proposed models.

The position of women in science was limited, but assessments differ on how strongly this affected Franklin's work. Anne Sayre stressed sexism at King's College, while others, including Brenda Maddox and Franklin's sister Jenifer Glynn, judged it more subtly. Tension with Maurice Wilkins arose partly because Randall had not made the division of work clear.

Her data on the two forms of DNA, the position of the phosphate groups on the outside and the dimensions of the helix set requirements for any model of DNA. Watson and Crick built their model in February and March 1953, partly on the basis of data from Franklin and Gosling, including an MRC committee report that Max Perutz gave to Crick in February 1953.

On 30 January 1953 Wilkins showed Watson 'Photo 51', according to the usual account without Franklin's permission. The double-helix model appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953 with a brief acknowledgement that mentioned Franklin's and Wilkins's unpublished work only as a stimulus. Their own papers, including Franklin and Gosling's, appeared in the same issue.

Her virus research gave insight into the construction of virus particles. After her death Klug took over the group; he received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, partly for structural work on nucleic acid–protein complexes. The group moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1962.

In 1956 tumours were found in her abdomen, but she kept working until shortly before her death. She died on 16 April 1958 in London, aged 37, from complications of ovarian cancer. Whether exposure to X-rays contributed has not been established; family factors are also mentioned. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Willesden.

In 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin had died four years earlier; under the current rules Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, and a prize is shared by at most three people. How she would have been treated had she lived is speculative.

Her memory is a subject of debate. Watson's memoir 'The Double Helix' (1968) portrayed her unflatteringly, which Klug and later biographers criticised as an incomplete picture. More recent work, such as an analysis by Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort in Nature (2023), holds that by March 1953 she had independently reached a double-helical interpretation of B-DNA but had not yet found base pairing.